Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

Tenacity

28 Tenacity Ceci n’est pas une histoire d’un pigeon. One night in Hanoi, before official U.S. rapprochement with Vietnam, Frenchy and I were in the Piano Restaurant and Bar awaiting the house special—Roasted Pigeon with Five Tastes. Frenchy wanted the dish, he said, because he didn’t think they could do it. We were exhausted from a month of backpacking, and I was sick with what I can only describe as sinking spells, brought on by the strange rainmist in northern Vietnam the French called crachin, which my dead grandmother would have called “pneumonia weather.”Our brains were saturated with an antimalarial drug that caused psychotic episodes in some users,and both of us were feeling odd. (Before we left on our trip, I was out jogging long after dark and came up behind someone with a guitar case, walking in the road. We were a mile out of town, and it was sleeting. He was six feet tall, but somehow I knew he was a leprechaun and was afraid to look at his face as I passed. Thinking on it, I’m sure it was the mefloquine. Why would a leprechaun have a mullet?) Frenchy and I drank beer and watched workers in gray coveralls, just outside the open doors of the restaurant,lift a sewer cover in the street with a pry bar, lower pails on long hemp ropes, and pull up gallon after gallon of night soil for the fields. As they poured the muck into a waiting cart, the stink bloomed. tenacity 29 Now the waiter arrived with the silver tray. He bent, smiled, and lifted the serving cover.The Pigeon with Five Tastes lay flattened on its dish like a bird accidentally cleated into a soccer pitch. Its back was broken, head thrown back,and beak open wide in a silent squawk of agony.It might have had a better plucking. We thighed the squab, and it collapsed under the weight of the blade into the puddle of its muddy gravy. Across the room an old woman played the theme to The Godfather on the eponymous piano,last tuned for Emperor Bao Dai, as her daughter tortured a violin. Frenchy took a bite.“I don’t know about five tastes,” he said.“I don’t like the one I’m gettin’. It’s not even a good smell.” A few shreds of meat, dark and slick, stuck to the jackstraw bones. I gave up and finished my rice, but Frenchy bent over the plate and probed the corpse for sustenance. “Listen, this is an old bird,”he said.“He must have run a long way before they finally caught him.” He pried at the bones with knife and fork then sucked gristle from the wing tendons. “I’m trying,” he said, sounding confused. He wiped his forehead with a greasy napkin.“I swear to God I keep tryin’and tryin’to eat this thing. . . .” Tenacity is not all virtue, and the more difficult the task, the more we invite judgment on our efforts. The problem is revealed in the etymology of the word: it comes from the Latin tenere, to hold. The metaphor connects holding on and its reward,naturally enough,but it’s easy for tenacious people to look ridiculous. Some find the tenacity needed to teach comical. We keep tryin’ and tryin’, meeting infrequently for just an hour at a time, to profess things to a diverse and often large audience, who may not have had enough interest in the subject to look into it on their own, and who, over the previous twelve to sixteen years of their educational lives, may have developed an antipathy to schedules, textbooks, the English language, teachers who remind them of their plumber fathers, and the screech of chalk on slate. Every time students catch sight of us coming through the door, they examine us as if we are exotic moths lured with acetylene lamps on a moonless night, judging, measuring, classifying, and pinning us to the board as types. 30 tenacity They make me out to be the sardonic Kevin Spacey type, their evaluations say, the Geoffrey Rush/Woody Allen type, the knock-kneed, humpbacked , pigeon-toed, google-eyed, snaggletoothed, potbellied, baldheaded, chicken-necked, horse-faced type who tries to sell them on the brilliance of literary stories while the sun shines and bees buzz in the begonias. It takes...